OCZ held
the upper hand with not only lower pricing for its Core Series SSDs, but also
the advantage of faster read/write performance. Super Talent's MX SSDs clocked
in with read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 40MB/sec. OCZ's Core SSDs
feature read speeds of 120 to 143 MB/sec and write speeds of 80 to 93 MB/sec
depending on the capacity of the drive in question.

With OCZ
breathing down its neck, Super Talent worked a little magic on its MX drives.
The 15GB and 30GB models now feature read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds
of 60MB/sec. The 60GB and 120GB have the same read speeds, but now have write
speeds of 80MB/sec.

"Our
expert engineering team is constantly discovering new ways to improve our
products, and this is one improvement that will be well received by power
laptop users", said Super Talent Director of Marketing, Joe James.
"We continue our relentless drive to add performance, features and value
to our SSDs while driving the price down."

In
addition to the speed bumps, Super Talent also recently posted a new $40
rebate to make SSDs more price competitive with OCZ's core lineup.

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My main concern about SSDs is their actual longevity in a "real world" environment. Current Flash memory "wears out" after a certain amount of RW operations, and when you consider how often the swap file is paged on any system, I'd be leary about picking up an SSD that may fail in less than 2 years.

If you're running on any current OS then yes, the swap file will be (should be) used. You CAN disable it in XP if you have a good amount of RAM and most of the time your system will run just fine...but a disabled swap file is unlikely to provide any noticeable performance gains...and it forces your physical mem to hold junk that is not necessarily needed by the program/game you are running. It does not have the perceived effect of forcing XP to use physical memory more efficiently.

As for the SSD MTBF ratings...I don't trust those. I read somewhere that the cells in SSDs are "cycled" so that the same cell is not constantly written to...but even so, as a given cell loses its ability to "remember" it could have an effect similar to bad sectors on a standard HD. The drawback being that it might happen more often unless the SSDs are using some improved flash memory technology.

I never wore out any of my flash memory, but then again, I've never used flash mem to run an OS or other I/O intensive application. I just use them for quick file transfers, digital pics and stuff like that.

Ah, but it does in fact have the actual effect of forcing XP to use physical memory more efficiently.

If you leave the pagefile enabled, it IS used even when the system has remaining free memory. Take a look at the figures in XP's Task Manager to see it, though I'll grant you that a significant chunk of the space is just a virtualized allocation based on application demands, not actually real data paged out, but nevertheless it is an overhead for the system to perform, an addt'l amount of time and processing required to do so.

The only reason not to disable virtual memory is if the system does not have enough physical memory to handle the sum total of allocated, not just actually *used*, space demanded by all applications, OS, etc.

It is always faster to not have a pagefile. It is sometimes a trivial difference in performance, even one not so readily measured with benchmarks since it's the multitasking, paging in and out between applications where you would see the most benefit - but that benefit is definitely there in some uses, readily perceivable especially in cases where you ran an application using a lot of memory then exited that application having to wait for other data to page back in before you can resume normal operations with the other apps.

Let's worry about SSD write cycle limitations when people start seeing it causing failure. Until then, we have nothing but evidence that mechanical drives are a bigger liability when it comes to data loss or downtime.

There are a fair amount of people that have used flash memory for OS. More than you might even realize when talking about industrial or other commercial embedded systems, mainly what needs to be done is essentially what you are arguing against, to disable needless and excessive writes to the drive from paging, and of course equip a system with enough main memory to allow this.

Beyond pagefile, a properly designed SSD should last several years running an OS for typical uses. EVen if you continually wrote to a drive over and over it could take many years.

Actually MTBF rate for consumer drives works out to be about 30 years. Now of course we all know that these numbers do not mean that every drive lasts that long, but the same holds true for those SSD numbers. To really know how these things last we are going to have a wait a few years for real world numbers to be available.

You have somewhat of a point, but the same does not really hold true, it's an apples and oranges comparison you are trying to make between a MTBF number and a write cycle number for a flash chip... especially true when we realize that it would be like using a rotational wear rating for the hard drive motor instead of the lifespan of the whole device.

Besides, it's just inappropriate to consider MTBF at all since we know it would be extremely rare to have any drive work continuously for 15 years, let alone twice that, while given a reasonable environment there is a good chance a properly designed SSD will last for the entirety of the rated life cycles.

Even so I would have to agree that we need more time to be sure of this, that there is not some other failure mechanism that will cause mortality instead of the so often quoted write cycle limitations. PCB delamination, tin whiskers, power surges, shock to the PCB causing it or onboard component damage are all more and more likely the longer the interval. A SSD might actually last 30 years even if nobody wanted to keep using the same one, being old/small/slow tech eventually, for even half that period.

There's only one real concern, that you buy a drive with ample free space. For example if you put Vista and some apps on one and had only 4GB free space remaining, you end up with roughly 1/5th the lifespan compared to using a larger SSD with 20GB remaining. Even in the former case you may find it lasts years.

Oh, I think You are wrong. At these R/W speeds and the price falling, it's a matter of not even a year before a wider acceptance. When people realize that at least one of their HDs can be exchanged with a noiseless AND fast(er) alternative it will happen. Because at that moment, that's what Acer, SONY, Toshiba, Dell, HP and all the others will be talking about soon. Intel is also doing it, so only a matter of time..

Am I missing something or is there no reason to believe all it takes is a firmware upgrade?

Suppose you send in the drive, what is their incentive to give you this performance boost through a firmware upgrade or give you a newer revision SSD that is faster? If they do that, it only encourages everyone to try and RMA their products.

I don't mean to be cruel but you bought it for a price and performance level present at that time. If you couldn't accept that you should not have bought it. Now you'd like to increase their costs, costs passed on to other consumers of their products.

Has anyone tried to combine a SSD with a traditional spindle HDD using a high performance RAID card (RAID 1 style mirror). Random writing is slower to the SSD than the HD then the HD finishes first and is ready to serve READ requests. SSD is faster for random reads while a HDD may be quicker for sequential or burst. RAID firmware would have to be very good to make the most of the unequal pairing.

If the 30GB Price is similar to OCZ. Then i expect the 15Gb to be fairly cheap. Considering OCZ sell 32GB at 179 USD. I expect 15Gb to be at most 129USD.

Using Raid 0 we can have a hugely fast 30GB SSD for less then 260 USD.

And for those who thinks SSD is still years away. These new 120MB/s SSD are only just the beginning. These SSD properly all uses the new controller with 8 Channel support. And all of them are using fairy cheap and slow MLC as well.

In the near future when we get 16 Channel controller chip as well as faster MLC we could see transfer speed 2 - 3 times faster then current SSD.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer